Building on his earlier work, Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden Debt, Ronald Green presents Kant as a major inspiration of Kierkegaard’s authorship. Green believes that Kant’s ethics provided the rigor on which Kierkegaard drew in developing his concept of sin. Green argues that the chief difference between Kant and Kierkegaard has to do with whether we need a historical savior to restore our broken moral wills. Kant rejected faith in vicarious atonement as undermining moral responsibility, and he pointed to the Genesis 22 episode of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac as an example of how reliance on historical reports can undermine ethics.
Kierkegaard rejected Kant’s rationalist solution to the problem of radical human evil. Kant had demolished the ontological proof by showing that whether something exists (including God) can never be logically deduced. Kierkegaard turns this great insight against Kant: whether God has forgiven our transgressions cannot be deduced from our moral need. Either God did or did not intervene on our behalf. “This fact,” says Kierkegaard, “is the earnestness of existence.”
Green offers unique readings of Fear and Trembling and Either/Or in his analysis and interpretation of Kierkegaard’s reading and response to Kant and their understanding of the divine and ethics.
A closing chapter focuses on love in time. In Works of Love, Kierkegaard places emotional feelings within a transcendent context. Erotic love is noble, but it must be purged of self-love and seek the fulfillment of the beloved as an independent being. Only by assuming ethical and religious meaning can romantic love fulfill its promise of eternity.

Reviews

Review by: Gordon Marino, professor of Philosophy, director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library, and author of Kierkegaard in the Present Age - October 1, 2011

In 1992 Ronald M. Green published Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden Debt . More than any other study, this book sparked a new and powerful interest in the relationship between Kant and Kierkegaard. The Hidden Debt brought the great existentialist thinker into dialogue with Kant and was the prime mover behind a number of dissertations and scores of articles. Scholars have long awaited Green's effort to dig even more deeply into the connection between these immortal philosophers. Kant and Kierkegaard on Time and Eternity was well worth the wait! This wide ranging study examines such diverse subjects as the powerful link between Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety and Kant's Religion within the Limits of Reason, the need for historical faith in both thinkers, and Either/Or considered as “Kantian transcendental deduction.” Elegantly written and rigorously argued, Green's book should concentrate the attention of serious students of both philosophers.

“Green has long done innovative work on the relation between the thought of Kant and of Kierkegaard, and this volume does the reader a great service by collecting a number of fine essays not otherwise easily accessible. He ties these essays together by putting them in a brand new perspective-namely, that of Kant and Kierkegaard's shared intense engagement with “the intersection of temporal experiences and timeless moral requirements.”